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Marcus Chown is the cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine and specialises in the Big Bang and parallel universes. In his latest book, The Never-Ending Days Of Being Dead (Faber), he looks at theories suggesting galaxies might be generated by a computer program, and that we'll all be resurrected in the dying days of the universe.

Let’s start with something simple: Why are we here?
Well, science can’t give an answer.

Where did the universe come from?
We know it exploded into being in a big bang. The evidence for that is everywhere – you turn on your television and about one per cent of the static between channels is the afterglow of the Big Bang. But as to where it came from, we still don’t know. There is an idea that there might have been other big bangs, going back almost into the infinite past but that just kind of pushes the question further back. Someone’s always going to ask: ‘What came before that?’

Where does the universe end? And what’s beyond it?
When we talk about the universe, we mean the observable universe. The universe has a horizon. According to the standard idea, called inflation, there’s an infinite amount beyond the horizon. If the universe is a soap bubble, beyond it are an infinite number of soap bubbles each containing stars and galaxies. There’s an unavoidable conclusion to this standard picture of physics that, in these other bubbles beyond the horizon, everything is repeated an infinite number of times – Elvis didn’t die on that loo eating a burger but is still alive in an infinite number of places. This is cosmology’s dirty little secret. It does seem that our universe is not the only universe there is, by a long, long way.

Do you believe that?
There are at least five or six different directions in science where nature is hammering us over the head, telling us this is not the only universe, though it’s difficult for us to accept. At the start of the 20th century, we simply thought our galaxy was the Milky Way but it keeps getting bigger and bigger – we had no idea it was one among tens of billions of galaxies. It seems now to be taking this huge leap where we think everything we see in our universe is just one among an infinite number of universes. That does seem to be what nature is telling us.

How likely is it we’ll ever meet our double?
It’s theoretically possible. The horizon is growing all the time so we’re seeing more and more of the universe. The problem is the nearest other domain where we’re having exactly this same conversation is a long, long way away. It would take that expanding bubble a long time to get there. And by the time it gets there, all the stars and everything would have burned out so there’d be nothing to see [laughs]. We discovered something in 1998 that blew physics apart, called dark energy, which is that the expansion of the universe, contrary to all expectations, seems to be speeding up. The Big Bang fired off shrapnel into space and you’d expect the expansion to slow down, but it’s getting faster and faster, shrinking the horizon, so we can see more and more. But we’re not likely to bump into our doubles in the near future.

There’s an idea that our universe could have been created as an experiment in someone’s garage

 

Does what we scientifically know about the Big Bang, dinosaurs and evolution prove God doesn’t exist?
Obviously, the timescale in the Bible is wrong – we know the universe is 13.7billion years old, whereas Christians say it started about 4004 BC. We have a lot of evidence of this age, so creationists say God has put the wrong evidence around to put us off track. Oddly, a lot of scientists are quite religious – one of the first people who came up with the idea of the Big Bang was a Catholic priest – but one of the most striking things as we look out across the universe is there’s no evidence of a supernatural force.

What do you think about creationism and intelligent design being taught in science classes in British schools?
Well, it’s not a science. We live in a world where we have antibiotics, pure running water and technology that makes our lives, on the whole, better. To throw all that out of the window is very scary. It isn’t simply that they want to establish creationism as a science, but they want to remove the alternatives. To go back to a medieval superstitious time is very worrying.

It’s been suggested that, if the universe came from a speck, it might be possible to create a universe in a lab. What would you need in your science kit?
We know that this process, called inflation, happened in the first few seconds of the universe – a very unusual state of matter with what’s called repulsive gravity. So, really, if you want to make a universe, all you need to do is recreate that state.

How?
If you got a bit of matter in a lab and you were to squeeze it down to an enormous density, inflation would be triggered and it would create a ‘baby universe’. In practice, it’s way beyond our technological capabilities but it’s not impossible. Accepting that we’re not the only intelligence in the universe, what if one civilisation in every galaxy at some point in its history did this experiment? There would be a hundred billion ‘daughter universes’ created. This has led to the idea that our universe could possibly have been created as an experiment in someone’s garage, with someone somewhere compressing a piece of matter to see what happened.

Another interesting theory suggests that trillions of years after our deaths, we’ll all be instantaneously resurrected in the last days of the universe with an eternity of existence stretching out in front of us. Have some of these guys been on the wacky baccy?
It is an out-there idea. But, believe it or not, the man behind it isn’t religious. In fact, his family died at Auschwitz so it’s perhaps understandable that he’d like to see all his family again. We face the problem that the universe is going to end, so it’s likely we would want to engineer a future – it’s basic survival instinct. This scientist suggests a rather odd future universe that we’d have to engineer. He suggests we’d all be recreated on virtually a computer simulation at the end of time. It’s a way-out piece of thinking but when I was speaking to him, my dog had just died and he said: ‘Don’t worry about that – you’ll meet your dog again at the end of time in this computer simulation.’ So he obviously believed it.

A lot of these ideas seem pretty ‘out there’.
Imaginative people have to dare to be wrong to move the frontiers of science forward.

Will we ever find ET?
I hope so but one of my worries is that we wouldn’t be able to see it. The reason we know a tree isn’t man-made is because it’s so complicated – but technology is becoming so complicated that it’ll become indistinguishable from a natural thing. So, if there’s a civilisation years ahead of us, it could be that we wouldn’t be able to recognise it.

So they could be here already?
We think they’d use radio dishes to communicate, so we look for radio waves. Their communication could be going through our office or living room in a form we don’t recognise. I’m certain that there are extra-terrestrials out there but it will be very difficult to spot them. The evidence could be out there, staring us in the face, and we wouldn’t know.

Athugasemdir

[Jón Steinar Ragnarsson, 1.3.2007 kl. 17:28]

Athyglisvert en svolítið "far and above."  Það er týpískt fyrir svona speFyrir mér er heimurinn óendanlegur, hvort, sem hann er ein sápukúla af óendanlega mörgum eða ekki. Afstæðnin er allsráðandi, þar sem til eru óendanlega lítil, óendanlega stór, óendanlega stutt og óendanlega löng hugtök á borð við tímann t.d. Sé allt óendanlegt í báðar áttir, þá geta engar mælieiningar náð yfir það. Tíminn er ekki til, nema sem mælieining í okkar takmörkuðu kollum og allt þetta er í raun eitt og sama augnablikið.

Eitt er dæmigert í máli þessa manns: "but one of the most striking things as we look out across the universe is there’s no evidence of a supernatural force."

Hann gefur sér að eitthvað sé til, sem getur ekki verið til og það að það finnist ekki, sem getur ekki verið til, sé merkilegt. Hvernig getur eitthvað verið "yfir" náttúrlegt? Allt hlýtur að felast í hugtakinu náttúrlegt þó við skiljum það ekki eða greinum það ekki. Að eitthvað sé fyrir ofan eða neðan það norm er asúrd og hugarburður einn.

Hann meinar vafalaust hið geistlega, alheimsgreindina, sem virðist vera til staðar í okkar fínstilltu heimsmynd, þar sem ekkert má bregðast um gráðu eða meter til að líf væri ómögulegt hér í því formi sem við þekkjum það.  Þetta er orkan, sem býr í öllu og er allt. Þegar nógu djúpt er skoðað bak smæstu eindum, þá er ekkert eftir annað en tifandi orka.  Massi og misjafn þéttleiki hans ræðst einfaldlega eftir tíðni þessa orkupúls. Því hraðar, því þéttara og efniskenndara. Við erum því samsett úr misjöfnum tíðnisviðum, sem spila saman hvoru öðru til stuðnings í ótrúlega nákvæmu sigurverki. Svo nákvæmu að okkur dettur helst í hug að einhver greind sé að baki. Þessa greind erum við gjörn á að kalla GUÐ.

Vona að einhver skilji þetta. Það er ekki auðvelt að setja svona hugsun í orð.